Intellinews

May 24 2026

Utah Stories

May 24 2026

The Armenian DNA Mystery No One Can Explain

Kevork Joulhayan walked into the Utah Stories studio carrying both deep pride in his Armenian roots and the weight of a history that still feels personal to many Armenians today. Not history pulled from textbooks or documentaries, but family history passed down through generations by survivors, grandparents, photographs, church communities, and stories that were never allowed to disappear. 

He brought old photographs. Armenian brandy. Pomegranate wine from Armenia. Stories about his grandfather. Stories about Aleppo. Stories about survival. Stories about names deliberately passed down so the dead would not disappear completely.

And before almost anything else, he wanted to talk about DNA.

“They cannot explain it,” he said.

Joulhayan described ancient remains discovered near the Aras River, near Mount Ararat, where researchers reportedly compared ancient genetic samples with modern Armenians and found remarkable continuity stretching back thousands of years. The way he spoke about it made it clear he was not trying to present a scientific lecture. To him, it reinforced what many Armenians already believe emotionally about themselves: despite invasions, massacres, forced conversions, deportations, conquest, exile, and genocide, their identity survived.

“How could that be?” he asked. “Mongolians attacked. Turks. Persians. Romans. Greeks. Armenian DNA should have changed.”

The conversation lasted nearly an hour, but everything eventually circled back to survival and the persistence of Armenian identity across generations. Joulhayan was not speaking only about physical survival after the genocide. He was talking about the survival of memory, language, religion, family structures, and the emotional inheritance passed from grandparents to grandchildren long after the original trauma ended.

Sitting across from him, it became obvious that the Armenian Genocide is not something he thinks about as distant history. It feels much closer than that, almost present tense.

The Grandfather Who Refused to Be Forgotten

Throughout the interview, Joulhayan was not simply sharing family stories. He spoke with the urgency of someone who feels responsible for keeping Armenian history alive and making sure the rest of the world understands what happened to his people. 

His grandfather escaped the Armenian Genocide in 1915 after fleeing Ain Tab, historically Armenian territory inside the collapsing Ottoman Empire. Like countless Armenian survivors, he eventually reached Aleppo, Syria, where displaced Armenians were rebuilding shattered lives from almost nothing.

There he married another genocide survivor. Together they raised eight children. One of those children became Joulhayan’s father.

Then he emphasized what his grandfather told the family before he died.

“You don’t owe me anything except one thing. Name one of your sons Kevork so I won’t be forgotten.”

Joulhayan became that grandson.

He smiled while telling the story, but the emotion underneath it was unmistakable. The name was not simply tradition but continuity. A way of ensuring that somebody who survived the genocide would continue existing inside future generations long after his death.

“Wherever Kevork ends up,” Joulhayan said, describing his grandfather’s thinking, “he’s going to tell my story.”

And decades later, sitting in Utah across from Richard Markosian, that is exactly what he was doing.

“Something Inside You Starts Bubbling”

“You can change your name. You can change your appearance. You can change your eye color, your hair color,” Joulhayan said. “DNA is not altering.”

For him, the survival of Armenian identity was inseparable from the genocide itself. Armenians had been scattered across Syria, Lebanon, Greece, Iran, and the United States, yet many families continued preserving the same language, churches, traditions, surnames, and tightly connected communities generation after generation.

“They always reconnect,” he said while explaining how Armenian families often sought out marriages within Armenian communities even after exile and displacement. “They always choose to marry one of their own.”

He described Armenians as people who survived repeated invasions and conquest while still holding onto a strong sense of identity. Mongolians. Turks. Persians. Romans. Greeks. Throughout the interview, he kept returning to the same question:

“How could Armenian DNA stay the same?”

Then he paused and connected it to something more emotional than science.

“Something inside you starts bubbling like a volcano,” he said. “You don’t know where it’s coming from. It’s coming from inside.”

For Joulhayan, the genocide did not erase Armenian identity because families continued carrying it forward through memory, religion, language, and family history. Even descendants born thousands of miles from Armenia still grew up hearing the stories.

Markosian’s own family history reflected that same continuity. His great-grandfather escaped after being conscripted into the Turkish army and ordered to fight Armenians. His great-grandmother survived deportation marches after being left for dead before eventually immigrating to Utah.

More than a century later, both men were still talking about the genocide not as distant history, but as something that continued shaping Armenian identity long after survivors themselves were gone.

Aleppo, Lebanon, and Waiting for America

Joulhayan was born in Aleppo in 1966 inside one of the largest Armenian diaspora communities formed after the genocide.

When he was still young, his family moved to Lebanon while applying to immigrate to the United States. The process took 15 years.

He spoke about those years carefully, but there were moments where the exhaustion underneath the story still surfaced. Lebanon descended into civil war during that time, and as an Armenian family living inside another country’s conflict, survival became uncertain again.

“I’m Armenian,” he said while describing those years. “I’m trying to survive.”

He told friends constantly that one day he was going to America. Not because he thought America was perfect, but because he associated it with freedom and stability after generations of instability.

Then the Beirut embassy bombing happened in 1983.

Only a week before his immigration appointment, the American embassy was destroyed in an attack that killed dozens of people, including U.S. Marines.

Joulhayan still seemed stunned remembering it decades later.

“One week before my appointment,” he said, shaking his head.

The immigration process collapsed again.

Eventually the family rerouted through Greece, spent time in Athens completing paperwork, and finally arrived in the United States.

Joulhayan came to America in his early twenties and eventually settled in Utah.

Despite everything he described throughout the interview, the thing he returned to repeatedly was gratitude.

“I love it here,” he said.

He spoke openly about freedom throughout the conversation, but not in an ideological way. He described freedom more personally, as the ability to openly be himself, openly Armenian, openly expressive without fear.

Armenia Was Never Just a Country to Him

He repeatedly returned to the idea that Armenians never fully separated themselves from the land, history, and religion that shaped them. While describing ancient Armenia, Joulhayan traced its borders from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and spoke about a civilization that existed long before modern Turkey.

“There was no Turkey,” he said at one point while discussing ancient Armenian kingdoms. “We’re talking B.C.”

He described Armenia as the first Christian nation, saying Armenians accepted Christianity in 301 A.D. before much of the rest of the world. When the discussion turned to the Council of Nicaea and the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire, Joulhayan spoke with unmistakable pride.

“We already know Jesus,” he said. “We already had the Bible. We already had written a Bible in Armenian. We already knew Jesus before them.”

To him, Armenian Christianity was not simply a religion. It was proof of continuity and endurance.

That same feeling came through when he pulled out a printed copy of the Armenian alphabet and began reciting it from memory.

“Since 301 A.D. we’ve been talking Armenian,” he said.

He explained that Armenian leaders created and preserved the alphabet because they feared losing their identity while living between larger empires and surrounding cultures.

“Freedom is very important for Armenians,” he said. “We would die for freedom.”

Mount Ararat surfaced repeatedly throughout the interview as well, not just as geography, but almost as emotional territory. Joulhayan connected Ararat to Noah’s Ark traditions, ancient Armenia, Armenian wine-making history, and the survival of Armenian civilization itself.

While holding a bottle of Armenian pomegranate wine, he described villages near Ararat where wine has supposedly been made for thousands of years.

“They just found a 5,000-year-old cave winery,” he said. “That village still makes wine.”

Later he pointed toward the Armenian coat of arms and explained the symbolism almost like someone introducing members of his own family. The eagle represented one Armenian royal house. The lion represented another. In the center sat Mount Ararat and Noah’s Ark.

“These little flags,” he said while pointing to the symbols around the crest, “each different kingdom, little minor kingdom was formed during this period.”

For Joulhayan, none of these subjects existed separately. Ancient Armenia, Christianity, language, Noah’s Ark traditions, genocide survival, diaspora communities, family names, and modern Armenian identity all seemed connected inside the same continuous story.

Why Recognition Still Matters

At one point, Markosian mentioned that when he first wrote about Armenian genocide survivors in Utah back in 2011, the United States still had not officially recognized the Armenian Genocide. That changed in 2021 when President Joe Biden formally recognized it as genocide.

“If they don’t tell the Turkish government, ‘You need to acknowledge it, accept it, apologize,’” Joulhayan said, “someone else somewhere is going to commit the same crime again.”

Then he pointed directly to Artsakh, also known as Nagorno-Karabakh.

“Happened in Artsakh,” he said. “One hundred fifty thousand Armenians that lived in Nagorno-Karabakh, they were driven away.”

“They’re homeless in Armenia,” he continued. “Armenia doesn’t have free land, free houses to give away.”

He spoke about Armenian churches being destroyed after Armenians fled.

“Every month Azerbaijani government is destroying one Armenian church,” he said. “They want to erase the Christian minority that was there.”

Later, while talking about the original genocide, Markosian reflected on the homes his great-grandparents once lived in.

“They just moved into their houses after they murdered them?” he asked.

“Yep,” Joulhayan replied.

“They stole the little Armenian kids,” Joulhayan continued. “They erased their identity. They put them in their own orphanage.”

According to Joulhayan, many people in modern Turkey are now discovering Armenian ancestry through DNA testing.

“They think they’re Turkish,” he said. “Then they find out, ‘Oh, I’m part Armenian.’ They’re shocked.”

The Photographs on the Table

Late in the interview, Joulhayan spread old family photographs across the table.

One showed his grandfather.

Another showed enormous family gatherings in Aleppo with children and grandchildren packed tightly together.

In one faded photograph, he pointed toward a tiny infant.

“That little baby,” he said quietly, “that’s me.”

The photographs clearly mattered to him deeply, not as nostalgic keepsakes but as evidence. Evidence that his grandfather survived. Evidence that the family continued. Evidence that the genocide failed to erase them completely.

By the end of the interview, the DNA discussion that opened the conversation almost felt secondary.

The deeper mystery was not really genetic.

It was how a people pushed through genocide, exile, war, displacement, and generations of instability still managed to hold onto themselves so fiercely more than a century later.

may 24 2026

Free Press Journal

May 23 2026

There are countries where religion is practised, and then there is Armenia, where it is lived. Here, Christianity does not simply reside within church walls; it spills into valleys, clings to cliff faces, and echoes through the cadence of daily life. To travel across Armenia, like I did a few years ago, is to trace the outline of one of the world’s oldest Christian civilisations, where faith and nationhood are inseparable threads.

The story begins, as many Armenian journeys do, at Khor Virap. Perched on a rise in the Ararat plain, with Mount Ararat looming like a painted backdrop, this monastery carries the weight of origin. It was here, tradition holds, that Gregory the Illuminator was imprisoned for years by King Tiridates III. His eventual release and the king’s conversion in 301 AD marked Armenia as the first nation to adopt Christianity as a state religion. It is a claim Armenians carry not as boast, but as inheritance.

From that moment, faith began to shape the Armenian landscape in stone. Monasteries rose not in cities, but in places that demanded effort—on ridges, beside gorges, carved into mountains. They were not merely places of worship; they were centres of learning, art and resistance.

Monasteries in stone

Further north lies Haghpat and Sanahin, monastic complexes that once functioned as medieval universities. Scholars studied theology, philosophy and science within their walls, copying manuscripts that preserved Armenian identity through centuries of upheaval. Even today, the wind that moves through their courtyards seems to carry fragments of chant.

 Then there is the Tatev Monastery, reached by a sweeping cable car ride over the Vorotan Gorge. The journey itself feels ceremonial, as though preparing the visitor for arrival. Once there, the monastery opens out into silence and sky, its stone walls blending into the surrounding cliffs. It is easy to understand why such places were chosen—not for isolation alone, but for proximity to the divine.

Faith in everyday life

Yet Christianity in Armenia is not confined to these grand monuments. It is embedded in smaller, more intimate expressions. Khachkars, intricately carved cross-stones, appear across the country—by roadsides, in fields, beside homes. Each one is unique, its patterns telling stories of faith, loss or gratitude. They are markers of both devotion and artistry.

In Yerevan, the capital, the presence of Christianity is less overt but no less constant. Churches stand between Soviet-era buildings and modern cafés, their bells punctuating the hum of urban life. On Sundays, families gather not out of obligation, but out of habit shaped over generations. Candles are lit with quiet intention; prayers are murmured rather than proclaimed.

Faith also finds _expression_ at the table. Armenian cuisine, though shaped by geography and history, carries traces of religious tradition. Dishes such as ghapama, a festive baked pumpkin filled with rice and fruit, are closely tied to celebrations like Christmas. Lavash, the thin flatbread baked in a tonir (much like a tandoor), holds cultural as well as spiritual significance. Bread, here, is not merely sustenance; it is symbolic.

Even language bears the imprint of belief. The Armenian alphabet, created in the early fifth century by Mesrop Mashtots, was devised in part to translate religious texts, ensuring that scripture could be read and understood by the people. In doing so, it anchored Christianity firmly within Armenian identity.

Enduring spirit

What was perhaps most striking to me was how seamlessly the sacred and the everyday coexist. A roadside chapel where a driver pauses to cross himself. A grandmother teaching a child how to light a candle. A wedding procession spilling out of a church, laughter mingling with ritual. These are not staged moments; they are lived ones.

Armenia’s history has not been without hardship. Empires have come and gone, borders have shifted, and the nation has endured profound loss. Through it all, Christianity has remained a constant—a source of continuity and resilience. Monasteries that once served as sanctuaries still stand, their stones bearing witness to centuries of faith.

To visit Armenia around Easter is to see this connection in its most vivid form. Churches fill with song, candles multiply in flickering clusters, and the air carries a sense of renewal that feels both spiritual and seasonal. It is not a spectacle designed for visitors, but a deeply rooted observance that invites quiet participation.

I soon realised that Armenia does not present Christianity as doctrine, but as landscape and life intertwined. It is there in the mountains, in the meals, in the measured rhythm of days. And for the traveller, it offers something rare—the chance to encounter a faith not as abstraction, but as a living presence woven into the fabric of a nation.

(The writer is a food and travel columnist and editor)

https://www.freepressjournal.in/lifestyle/inside-armenia-where-ancient-monasteries-and-daily-life-become-one-living-faith